Meditation+on+Essential+Question+1

Meditation on Essential Question 1

How does students’ language development affect their learning?

Before I started student-teaching, I knew that a variety of cultural factors can determine how students' language-development affects their learning, but I hadn't had any experiences with struggling students who didn't speak standard English. For them, grasping some basic rules of grammar were difficult. Many of the seniors couldn't remember that, if a sentence ends with a quotation, the punctuation mark belongs after the last word in the quotation but before the closed quotation mark. Reading a few books would help them remember this, but most of them don't like to read, and some live in households too noisy, crowded, and hectic for any substantial reading to get done.

The parents of some of the students where I taught don't speak English at all. Some of the parents speak only Spanish. Some of the students live in areas where Spanish, Spanglish, and Ebonics are the only languages and dialects to be heard. School is the only place where a lot of them hear and occasionally try to speak standard English, and many don't know why they should care to learn it. They've been told that speaking standard English will help them get jobs and gain them admittance to college, and although they seem to believe it, they have no desire to learn to speak and write it other than to make their families proud and make money in the future.

One example of how a students' language-development affects their learning has to do with how their parents speak as opposed to how their teachers speak. If a student grows up speaking in a manner in which the subjects and verbs disagree in his/her sentences, the teacher's use of standard English may confuse that student and be difficult to imitate. If the student is raised in an environment in which people speak in a fashion similar to that of the teachers in his/her life, the student is more likely to excel as an English student.

I learned to incorporate the way students speak at home, their primary discourse, and the way they are taught to speak at school, their secondary discourse, with code-switching lessons and exercises in which students have to rewrite ungrammatical song lyrics, both of which were demonstrated in Lauren King's class. By asking the students to paraphrase a Shakespeare quote and then write the same message in various styles--to friends, family, teachers, the mayor--students can enjoy bringing their discourse into the classroom and comparing, contrasting, and reading their messages aloud. My favorite exercise, though, involved rewriting song lyrics, a part of a lesson I conducted in Lauren King's class for the Linguistic Dimensions Study assignment. I learned this exercise in class this semester. By rewriting lyrics to pop songs, they can enjoy having some of their favorite celebrities incorporated into their grammar lesson. I also think that by teaching students to embrace code-switching exercises, which the teachers at my school had never heard of until I mentioned it, students can have fun pretending to write to the mayor and the teachers as well as writing to their friends. It shows that the teachers embrace their identities and would like to use them in their lessons. It's partly an exercise in community-building.

I also think "If Black English Isn't English, Then Tell Me What Is?" the essay by James Baldwin, helped clarify the notion that there is much about the way African-Americans speak English that white people don't understand. It is essential for teachers to learn more about the primary discourse of their students in order to communicate with them effectively.

Point of Tension: Self-Study